The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten

By Thomas M Disch

Not since The Da Vinci Code!
The only tome ever written by God Himself!
INSPIRED BY ACTUAL EVENTS!

In this compelling memoir, the first and hopefully the last of its kind, America’s most divine author reveals the intimate and shocking details of His sudden elevation to the most coveted and least understood position in the universe.

In early 2005 (A.D.), wearying of the world’s religious schisms, doctrinal heresies, and manifold editorial sins, Thomas M. Disch took matters into His own hands and became the Deity.

As controversial as it is incontrovertible, the moving true story of His awful transformation and its awesome aftermath reveals, at long last, the hidden web that links Disch, Philip K. Dick, Western wear, the Leamington Hotel, and Eternity itself. Read it in fear and trembling. But read it, or else.

YOU WILL LAUGH. YOU WILL CRY. YOU WILL PRAY.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tachyon Publications
• Release date: Jul 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781616963330

Book preview

Praise for Word of God

Tom Disch is the Devil! He says he’s God, but he’s not. Read this book against my warning, and at your peril. Every page you turn will send you deeper into the abyss. Tom Disch is America’s own Mephistopheles!

–

Alice K. Turner, Author of

The History of Hell

The god Disch is brilliant, startling, playful, vengeful, poetic, and kind of scary. As gods go, we could do worse. The writer Disch is brilliant, startling, playful, vengeful, poetic, and kind of scary. As writers go, there is no one better.

–

Karen Joy Fowler, Author of

The Jane Austin Book Club

Diversely gifted…entirely original…joyously versatile . . . a unique talent.

–

Newsweek

Of course, Tom has always been Jovial…but an actual divinity? Only now must I relinquish my birthright atheism, in recognition of the presence of a literary god. An obscure Vietnamese cult worshipped Victor Hugo, and I was tempted, but that was long ago, and they have passed from the scene.

–

Norman Rush, author of

Mating and Mortals

One of the most remarkably talented writers around.

–

Washington Post Book World

When it comes to Thomas Disch, label makers scratch their heads…. This literary chameleon redefined science fiction with novels that have been compared to the best from Orwell to Huxley, wrote bestselling children’s books about talking kitchen appliances, earned censure from the Catholic Church for an off-Broadway play, published light verse, twisted the pulp conventions of gothic fiction, experimented with interactive software, and demolished the American poetry establishment, ufo cults, and other sacred cows in brilliant critical essays.

–

Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Novelist, poet, and critic, he has become a most significant literary presence.

–

American Academy of Arts And Letters

I first came to believe in God when he successfully cured my cancer in 1969. A few years later he again answered my prayers by laying his hands on my first wife’s belly and ensuring that our child would be a son. On almost every occasion when I have prayed sincerely and selfishly to God in whatever country I have been in he has answered me with his generous blessings most recently when he cured my diabetes in what I call the Miracle of the i-35 Dairy Queen. I cannot worship nor give my heart to a more beneficent or loving God than He. I have thanked God on every occasion I have been presented with a major literary prize or when those I consider my literary rivals and enemies have been denied awards or been struck with deadly diseases.

–

Michael Moorcock, author of

Stealer of Souls And Behold the Man

A lovely, funny, interesting, incisive, and wonderfully blasphemous novel.

–

Jeff Vandermeer, author of

Annihilation And Borne

It has been the happy fate of myself, my twin brother Greg, and our two younger sibs, Gary and Nancy, to have grown up with a god for an older brother. Sometimes it has been difficult to get along with such a perfect know-it-all, but didn’t Jesus’s siblings have the same blessed problem? What can I say? We adore him.

– Jeffrey James Disch

I had never thought of Tom as stooping to God before, but it turns out to have been a good idea. It’s good to hear from a Voice up there that knows the score, knows how to share His laughter with those who are mostly victims of His terrible laugh, knows that He too is art of the Joke. So please stay on high. Do us all Worlds of good.

–

John Clute

Books by Thomas M. Disch

Fiction

The Genocides (1965)

Mankind Under the Leash (1966)

One Hundred and Two H-Bombs (1966)

Echo Round His Bones (1967)

Camp Concentration (1968)

Under Compulsion (1968)

The Prisoner (1969)

Getting Into Death and Other Stories (1973)

334 (1974)

The Early Science Fiction Stories of Thomas M. Disch (1977)

On Wings of Song (1979)

Fundamental Disch (1980)

Neighboring Lives [with Charles Naylor] (1981)

The Man Who Had No Idea (1982)

The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984)

The Brave Little Toaster (1986)

The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars (1988)

The M.D.: A Horror Story (1992)

The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1995)

The Word of God (2008)

The Wall of America [forthcoming] (Tachyon, 2008)

Non-Fiction

The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetasters (1995)

The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998)

The Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry (2002)

On SF (2005)

Poetry

Highway Sandwiches [with Charles Platt and Marilyn Hacker] (1970)

The Right Way to Figure Plumbing (1972)

ABCDEFG HIJKLM NPOQRST UVWXYZ (1981)

Burn This (1982)

Orders of the Retina (1982)

Here I Am, There You Are, Where Were We (1984)

Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems (1989)

Dark Verses and Light (1991)

Haikus of an AmPart (1991)

The Dark Old House (1996)

As Editor

Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories That Scared Even Me [with Robert Arthur] (1967)

The Ruins of the Earth: An Anthology of Stories of the Immediate Future (1971)

Bad Moon Rising (1973)

New Constellations: An Anthology of Tomorrow’s Mythologies (1976)

Strangeness: A Collection of Curious Tales (1977)

Thomas M. Disch

THE WORD OF GOD

or, Holy Writ Rewritten

Tachyon Publications | San Francisco

The Word of  God

Copyright © 2008 by Thomas M. Disch

The New Me © 1983 by Thomas M. Disch. Originally appeared in Changes: Stories of Metamorphosis, edited by Michael Bishop and Ian Watson (Ace: New York).

This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events, especially the late Philip K. Dick, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Cover design by Ann Monn

Interior design & composition by John D. Berry

The text and display typeface is Adobe Jenson Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach, with Herculanum,  designed by Adrian Frutiger, on the title page

Tachyon Publication

1459 18th Street #139

San Francisco, CA 94107

[phone]

[e-mail]

www.tachyonpublications.com

Series editor: Jacob Weisman

Print ISBN:

978-1-892391-77-3

Digital ISBN:978-1-61696-333-0

First Edition: 2008: First Digital Edition: 2019

to Ben Downing

A Doll’s Prayer

Now I lay me down to die

and bite my lip so’s I won’t cry.

If I should go to sleep instead

I pray I will not wet my bed.

—

Betsy P

Chapter One

Let there be light.

There, the word is spoken and the universe has been brought into existence, and the Enlightenment along with it. We’ll proceed from there. The important thing, always, is to have made a beginning. That’s certainly been the way when I’ve written fiction, and Holy Writ probably works the same.

The title was no problem at all. It came in the proverbial flash. Whereas the subtitle has kept morphing ever since. Earlier versions have been variations on And How You Can Be Too or its opposite; then, off on another tangent, Memoirs of an American Divinity. The latter, a tip of the hat to the transcendental tradition that covers such a broad range of Yankee divines as Emerson, Ann Lee, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy. Not all of them gods of an absolute and omniscient variety, like me, but prophets who’ve felt themselves to be on a par with Mohammed and whose scriptures have been accorded a similar reverence by large numbers of their fellow citizens. As polls keep showing, and media is ever reminding us, we Americans are a very religious nation, whose natural element is belief.

As to the revelations I mean to unfold, many will be of that traditional High Utterance that lays down laws and offers delectable previsions of heaven and saber-rattling fantasies of enemies horribly revenged, but there will also be talks of a friendlier locker-room character (the more American side of the vision), with homespun scriptures sometimes verging on whimsy. But nowhere will there be irreverence. Indeed, it’s precisely in the more playful and paradoxical passages that seekers may find the touchstones of a perfected faith, for faith is never more perfectly rooted in the soul than when one can truly believe in something one knows to be preposterous, like Noah’s Ark. Christ had a special love for children and for simpletons (the poor in spirit); I can do no less.

Years ago, back before I knew myself to be divine, I lived next door to two Mormon missionaries in the Mexican town of Amecameca, an hour south of Mexico City. In all of Amecameca, they were the only other people who spoke English, and they delighted, in a true missionary spirit, in arguing about religion, and in particular they liked to controvert Darwin and his theory of evolution. They had books filled with gorgeous views of the Grand Canyon, which (it was maintained) had not been formed by the long drudgery hypothesized by secular humanist geology textbooks but assembled from raw materials in the time it takes to make an omelet. That this flew in the face of orthodox scientific wisdom was clearly a source of pleasure to my two neighbors.¹ Logical difficulties only kindled their faith to a brighter glow and made their voices louder.

It is the special beauty of faith, that, like the fabled Phoenix, it draws its life from the flames that destroy it. It flies as it dies. A moth is the same in some ways, and it is the business of gods and of their prophets to light such beguiling flames that the faithful cannot escape their supernal charm. The Jonestown suicides in Guyana, the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s intended massacres, and militant Islam’s achievements across the globe are all instances of the destructive power of faith. I’d like to assure my own faithful readers that I don’t intend to lure them to any such immolation of themselves and others. If that makes me seem a lesser sort of a god, so be it. Like Christ, I shall defer slaughter and reprisals to the afterlife. Here and now, in the little time remaining, my enemies and competitor-gods will find that their threats and execrations will be powerless against the buckler and shield of my divine equanimity and sense of humor. All my justice shall be poetic.

The Greek gods were good at the same sort of thing, the way they’d find some fitting metamorphosis for anyone who pissed them off, turning house-proud Arachne into a spider and beautiful Io into a cow. But their cruelties and vendettas were not their defining features, nor yet their loves, wonderful as those were. Their beauty, then? Surely, that was a considerable asset, and any worshipper allowed inside one of their temples for a glimpse of Zeus or Apollo or Venus or Minerva must have been unnerved and overawed by their larger-than-life stature and command of good form. Gods then were expected to look terrific.

The Jews and their fellow monotheists had a less capital-intensive ideal: their god was just a voice in their heads — at least most of the time. Or words in a book. (Like the words in this book? you well might ask.) Their beauty did not need the high-priced skills of a Phidias, just a capable script-writer and a lector of sufficient charisma. It helps to have a naive audience, of course. Any parent can play Santa, and shamans don’t need a college degree. The holy writings of Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard will never qualify either prophet for inclusion in the Library of America. (And my own chances in that regard? They might seem slim, but only God knows what may happen in the fullness of time—and I’m not telling!)

Literary merit doesn’t matter much with Holy Writ. What matters is the faith that its faithful can bring to it. In dramas of faith the spotlight is always trained on the believer, on the born-again sinner being dunked in the baptismal pool or the martyr being thrown to the lions or the Palestinian child swaddled in the ammo-belts of his or her exemplary suicide. Their astonishing actions act to authenticate the gods they believe in. Doubt their gods and the believers’ lives have been in vain. That’s why it is good manners and simple prudence not to be express skepticism about the faith of strangers.

Again, I hasten to assure readers that I do not mean to solicit their self-immolation or even their total immersion in the pages ahead. I do have a program for the conduct of American foreign policy, and a few simple rites and superstitions I would have you observe, but I’ll hold off on those things until we know each other better and I have been able to explain the tenets of our faith—and its commandments.

The first of which, like that of the Mosaic law, is that you stay seated where you are and continue reading this Holy Writ and have no other gods before you, nor any other author, for at this point in the drama of your conversion the two amount to the same thing. Not that there will be any terrible consequences if you put this Writ aside and enjoy some other licit pleasure for a while, for as I am not the kind of divinity that insists on corporal punishment now or in the hereafter, not even of such an indirect or non-miraculous kind as tornados or the arthritis I have to put up with. Life is hard enough in those regards without God adding to it.

Of course, doubters will experience an inner spiritual anguish of indescribable intensity as a result of being removed from my divine presence, but (here’s another fine divine paradox) they won’t know that they’re in such a wretched state, just as the congenitally blind don’t know what they’re missing vis-à-vis vision.

Does all this begin to seem silly? It should. Pompous and grandiose? Absolutely. That has usually been my response to those zealots who have threatened me with fire, brimstone, and eternal punishment. I suspect them, as well, of ill-repressed sadistic tendencies, as though they would not be averse to administering some of their promised torments themselves, as agents of the latest holy inquisitions, if only they were not required elsewhere to sing in the heavenly choir.

So is this Holy Writ or isn’t it? Am I being serious? Yes, and then some. What I propose to write about in these sacred pages is what the whole God-business looks like to someone who not only doesn’t believe in God but who, moreover, doesn’t believe in the belief of those most aggressively pious, most loudly devout. The only way effectively to convey my own sense of the matter is to arrogate to myself the same absolute authority, the same more-than-Papal infallibility,

Reviews for The Word of God

[nmele_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's difficult to categorize this Disch book, other than to say it is hilarious, insightful and very well-written.

[rpuchalsky_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Reading this book just after Disch's suicide is an odd experience. It gives his usual emotionally cool style an oddly hectoring tone, as if to say: enjoy these bits and pieces -- because I'm dead! Appreciate my poetry -- because I'm dead! Continue reading as a steadily more pointless piece about PKD in hell takes over the book -- because I'm dead!Who knows what I'd think of it otherwise. Since it involves the rape of Disch's mother by a felon, leading to his birth (as part of his burlesque Christlike self-deification), I'd probably think its nastiness-to-genius ratio was over the usual limit that makes most Disch works well worth reading.

[edecklund · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book reads like a collection of short stories interspersed with personal commentary or, should I say, personal commentary interspersed with a few short stories. The conceit of naming himself God works as both a biographical and literary framework. Some may wonder if they really need or want to know so much about the author himself but I thought it worked perfectly as a "blog in print" and I'm not a big blog fan. My favorite piece: The other God and St. Peter visit earth to view Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ." Elsewhere, one of my favorite writers appears as a recurring character. Don't read this book if you are overly religious or don't like to think.

[dw0rd_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book reads like a collection of short stories interspersed with personal commentary or, should I say, personal commentary interspersed with a few short stories. The conceit of naming himself God works as both a biographical and literary framework. Some may wonder if they really need or want to know so much about the author himself but I thought it worked perfectly as a "blog in print" and I'm not a big blog fan. My favorite piece: The other God and St. Peter visit earth to view Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ." Elsewhere, one of my favorite writers appears as a recurring character. Don't read this book if you are overly religious or don't like to think.